Biden chooses Anthony Blinken, a champion of global alliances, as his foreign minister

WASHINGTON – Anthony J. Blinken, a defender of global alliances and one of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s closest foreign policy advisor, is expected to be nominated for the position of Secretary of State, a position in which he will try to integrate skeptical international partners in a new competition with China, according to people close. Out of operation.

Mr. Blinken, 58, prof Former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Under President Barack Obama and Guitar fanHe began his career at the State Department during the Clinton administration. His broad foreign policy credentials are expected to help placate American diplomats and world leaders alike after four years of the Trump administration’s bounce strategies and National ostentation.

He has been with Mr. Biden for nearly 20 years, including as his senior aide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and later as Mr. Biden’s national security advisor when he was vice president. In this role, Mr. Blinken helped develop the US response to political turmoil and its ensuing instability across the Middle East, with mixed results in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.

But among his new priorities is re-establishing the United States as a reliable ally and ready to join global agreements and institutions – including the Paris climate agreement, the Iran nuclear deal, and the World Health Organization – that the president has abandoned. Trump card.

“Simply put, the big problems that we face as a country and a planet, whether it is climate change, whether it is an epidemic, whether it is the spread of bad weapons – let’s say the obvious, there are none of these unilateral solutions,” he said. Blinken He said this last summer. “Even a powerful country like the United States cannot handle it alone.”

Mr Blinken said at the same July forum at the Hudson Institute that working with other countries could have the added benefit of facing another major diplomatic challenge: competing with China by opting for multilateral efforts to promote trade, technology investment, and human rights – rather than forcing individual states. To choose between the economies of the two superpowers.

This likely means spending diplomatic time establishing stronger ties with India and across the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Fourteen countries recently signed one of the world’s largest free trade agreements with China. An effort could also be made to deepen engagement across Africa, as China has achieved successes in technology and investments in infrastructure, recognizing Europe as a partner of “first, not last resort, when it comes to addressing the challenges we face,” he said at the Hudson Institute.

Some described it As a mediator with a series of interventions, Mr. Blinken also sought to reduce refugee and migration crises. On the last day of the Obama administration, he was The US State Department has set a maximum number of 110,000 refugees Who will be allowed to resettle in the United States in fiscal year 2017. This number It has since dwindled to 15,000 In fiscal year 2021.

He said he would look to provide more assistance to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – the Northern Triangle countries in Central America – to convince immigrants that they will be safer and better off by staying back home.

All of this, he said, is likely to leave less time and resources for the Middle East, although that was the policy space that consumed Mr. Blinken in the years following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Help draft Mr. Biden’s Senate proposal To create three autonomous regions in Iraq, Divided by ethnic or sectarian identity, which was widely rejected, including by the country’s prime minister at the time. During the Obama administration, Mr. Blinken was a key player in the diplomatic effort to harness more than 60 countries to counter the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Unlike some of his naughty colleagues in the Obama administration, Mr. Blinken held talks with journalists in Baghdad in 2012 to get insights beyond what soldiers, diplomats and intelligence officers can provide inside the embassy compound.

Prior to taking a job at the Foreign Office’s European Policy Office in 1993, Mr. Blinken had aspired to be a journalist or filmmaker. He honed his media skills by being a foreign policy writer for President Bill Clinton, after which he oversaw European and Canadian politics at the White House National Security Council.

Mr. Blinken grew up in New York and Paris, and graduated from Harvard and Columbia Law School. Mr. Blinken, the son of an ambassador to Hungary during the Clinton administration and stepson of a Holocaust survivor, often spoke of the moral example the United States sets for the rest of the world.

“In times of crisis or disaster, it is the United States that the world turns to first and always,” Mr. Blinken said at a press conference. 2015 Speech at the Center for a New American Security.

He said: “We are not the leader of the first choice because we are always right or because we are universally loved or because we can dictate the results.” “This is because we strive to align our actions with our principles, and because American leadership has a unique ability to mobilize others and make a difference.”